Quick Justice/No Justice

Michael Gallagher

In the continuing swirl and roil of violence in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince, Michael Gallagher, an American citizen and head of security for the Haitian tobacco firm Comme Il Faut, was stabbed to death in the company’s offices last week, after business hours on Wednesday, August 19. The police quickly took thirteen people into custody for questioning, and a suspect has been arrested. According to reports in the Miami Herald, the suspect, a Comme Il Faut employee who worked with Gallagher, is believed to have been stealing from the company to the tune of $69,000. At the time of the murder, Gallagher, who had lived in Haiti for 20 years, was on the trail of the money and was preparing to expose the employee. Another person on Gallagher’s team is thought to have worked with the suspect, according to a source close to Gallagher. Gallagher was also believed to have kept a large sum of his own money at the company’s offices. 

Up in the mountains

Three days after Gallagher’s murder, gang members swept through Kenscoff, a pastoral municipality up on the mountainside behind Port-au-Prince, killing as many as 47 people, among them at least five children, and kidnapping 50 more, according to Guardian reports. The larger gangs worked in tandem to commit the massacre and kidnapping, according to police and Kenscoff officials, also burning down at least 25 homes in the area. It’s thought that their goal may be to attract attention, manpower and weaponry away from downtown Port-au-Prince in order to descend on and capture a vulnerable capital, which in any case is already a welter of gang fiefdoms controlling about 70% of the city. So far no one has been arrested in connection with the Kenscoff massacre.

The discrepancy between the speed with which a suspect was arrested in the killing of Mike Gallagher, an American, and the lack of arrests in the killing of nearly 50 Haitians, has been duly noted by Haitians in comments on social media. Of course, during the rise of the gangs in Haiti over the past five years (and more) very few to none of the perpetrators of the killings and kidnappings of more than 10,000 Haitians have been arrested, much less charged, tried, convicted and sentenced. Most are still out on the street, continuing their mad depredations. The plan behind all this, if plan there is, seems to be to make of Haiti the reverse of the Swiss medal, without the snow and the banks and the veneer of law and right, but still a place where any deal can go down with no eyes watching — to turn it, in other words, into a gang-run kleptocracy available for all sorts of criminality, especially drug transshipment, a kleptocracy which effectively it already is. 

Meanwhile, gang violence has forced more than 1.5 million Haitians from their homes and into shelters or the streets. On top of this, the U.S. has begin its unthinkable program of sending back Haitians who’ve been living in the U.S for the past ten to 15 years into Haiti and this unpredictable, unstable, and violent situation on the ground. So far, the deportation flights have been depositing their human cargo in the northern city of Cape Haitian, which is less volatile than Port-au-Prince at the moment. But when the gangs realize that new meat and back accounts are flowing into the north, they will soon make their way up there to terrorize the hapless new arrivals, Trump’s deportees. 

Elections, Haiti’s first in 16 years, are scheduled to be held on December 13. It’s hard to envision free and fair elections with actual voters stepping out to vote, given the circumstances in Haiti. We’ll see who ends up with the more peaceful, freer, and fairer elections this year, Haiti or the U.S.  

In any case, Richard Miguel, an old Haitian friend of mine who has known Mike Gallagher for many years, wanted to say something about the kind of role Mike played in people’s lives in Haiti; 

I find it disturbing, in the wake of my dear friend Mike Gallagher’s violent and unjustifiable murder, that Haitians on social media are focusing right now on his race. Some are commenting that all Americans should die.Some say that the fact that Americans are deporting Haitians from the U.S. means that Americans should be eliminated from Haitian soil, and some point out that after all, Americans are responsible for the state of Haiti today. True or not true, none of that matters to me .
What does matter is that Mike worked very hard here in Haiti and gave all he could to improve conditions for many people, including his employees at Comme Il Faut.
He often told his guards there that they should take advantage of the free English courses available at Comme Il Faut so that they could get a better job in the future. He paid for Spanish lessons for me for a year at more than 300 per month. But it wasn’t what he gave me that was important. I saw the true man; I saw how he was affected when his wife’s niece died of ovarian cancer and he tried to save her but couldn’t. He paid for her funeral. 
Mike paid for my daughter’s school in the Dominican Republic for the past three years.

These people that killed Mike don’t care that they killed a good man who was only trying to do his job as he thought right.
The details of his death remind me of that of Jovenel Moise [the Haitian president assassinated in 2021]. Like Jovenel who was murdered at his official residence less than a year before the end of his term, Mike was killed only few months prior to his retirement from employment.
Mike loved his job and repeatedly told me how well Comme il Faut treated him. Even though  things were rough, with gangs all around the place, Mike didn’t want to abandon the company. He was responsible and even decided it would be best to live ON SITE at the compound in order to better protect the building and its staff.

Mike will be missed terribly and this will affect the well being of at least thirty people who aren’t his immediate family but who depended on Mike for support. He provided generously and without any personal vanity for friends in need, for a wide circle of Haitian acquaintances and their kids, people who don’t have the resources to provide for themselves in the current Haitian economy. 

May the criminals who stabbed him to death get their karma refund and may Mike’s soul rest in eternal peace. A wonderful human being was eliminated.
He wasn’t just an American in Haiti. He was a caring and ethical person.

I hope, if there is some trace of justice left in Haiti, that those responsible will be held accountable.

If not GOD will deal with them eventually.

Mike saved his hard earned money for many, many years in order to have a decent retirement.
Unfortunately that won’t be happening now.
Take care, Mike. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye.
Farewell my brother, my friend. You are a light that will shine on forever.